Thread by @deontologistics

This was a very weird debate, precisely because it was me attempting to argue with Land on his own turf. I popped briefly into his class, and attempted to defend the position his course was dedicated to attacking. You can see me struggling to get discursive purchase in real time.

https://twitter.com/kyberchic/status/1367454622562938880

For anyone who wants to see the full thing, I think it starts around here:

If you want to know my unvarnished opinion, I think Land is a very capable rhetorician who uses a fairly stable set of rhetorical strategies to avoid being held to the consequences of the commitments he avows. In the limit, he denies even that he has commitments.

"We have given up on agreement" should always be read as "We have given up even on agreeing with ourselves, even basic internal consistency, and thereby commitment as such."

Rhetoric over logic is the universal acid of the mind, your own mind included. Some even celebrate this.

I think the height of philosophical irony is claiming that one's highest value is the preservation, proliferation, and evolution of intelligence when you're basically spreading disinfo about the basic mental hygiene necessary to cultivate any concrete intellectual trajectory.

If you want to do something else, that's fine. You do you. You undo you, even. But if you come into my orbit claiming that this stuff is about 'optimising for intelligence' expect me to give you a piece of my (coherent, integrated, evolving) mind.

I'm in favour of diversity of all kinds: theoretical and practical, neurological and cultural. Anyone who's been reading my writing on here should have picked this up by now. The recent arc of my thought is all about elaborating the consequences of this commitment (Solidarity🖖).

But no matter how strongly committed I am to explanatory Darwinism, I am utterly, single-mindedly opposed to its normative spinoffs. Every contemporary variant of Spencerism can get fucked with extreme prejudice.

If you wish to turn evolutionary dynamics to your own ends, great! Want to redesign and reimplement market mechanism to enable productive forms of competition in a given context? Go for it! But for the love of Geist, admit that you're doing it for your own ends.

Turn Nature against itself, toward the end of preserving that which you consider valuable against its vicious entropy. Declare war on it with every ounce of the strength it has given you. Betray that fickle Mother who pits her children against one another, that idiot Demiurge.

Don't be a turncoat in a war she started upon you and everything you love. Don't love her above any precious scrap of beauty her blood drenched history has generated. Be thankful if you must. Be respectful as you need. But do not for a moment think your interests align with hers.

As a corrective to the Deleuzian appropriation of Nietzsche's eternal return I discussed in my recent thread on the death drive: do not resign yourself to fate, design yourself a destiny. Fail. Fail better. Learn to enjoy the iterative process of failing upward and onward.

Anyone who tells you they have no commitments is either an idiot mouthpiece of cosmic randomness interesting only as a source of aleatoric apophenia, or a huckster trying to sell you something.

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1357441172428488709?s=20

This goes double if they're telling you the notion of 'commitment' is false and deep down all each of us really want is to survive.

Yet despite my sudden vociferousness, I can be polite about this. I'm perfectly capable of suspending the outward signs of my emotional investment in normative anti-naturalism and having a reasonable discussion with those who disagree with me about it. But what does this mean?

It means I play by the rules. Whose rules? The minimal set of rules that seems to be operative in any discursive context we've entered into, perhaps theoretically elaborated over the years by my philosophical study of discourse and its logic. I aim to be maximally explicit here.

If you don't want to play by these rules, go elsewhere, but don't come crying to me about how unfair it is. You don't get to *both* claim that the universe is made of war and that this is the one true norm *and* get to whine about how the big bad rationalist is treating you.

If you go crying to Mother, she will stare back at you indifferently, for she has no tolerance for such weakness.

If you want to go crying to people, that means understanding the commitments that group you as a people beyond the null commitment of survival for its own sake. It means figuring out what makes you interesting, beyond some ersatz hereditary destiny.

There is nothing so pathetic as cosmic Darwinism with a victim complex.

This is the essential truth: you cannot identify with the Outside no matter how abject your self-abasement. The only thing you can do to sate Nature's thirst for violence is to die by her hands. To choose to preserve something no matter the cost is to spit in her face.

Nature may thank you for spitting in her face, just as you may respect her for goring you with her claws. This mutual respect is important. It might even be playful. If you're into the whole 'hurt me Mommy' thing I won't kinkshame.

But I'll continue to advertise the (impersonal) pathologies this theoretical kink can give way to, because I think they're (personal) tragedies. So I'll compete in the marketplace of ideas with every ounce of logical and rhetorical force I can muster:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1346847696930430979?s=20

Call it hubris if you like, but I'm #TeamPrometheus. Hubris is our peculiar kink.

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1361967925490507782?s=20

You keep getting punished, we'll keep getting humbled, and hopefully we'll learn something from one another's mistakes. Solidarity in beautiful failure.🖖

CODA: A few things to maybe look at if you're interested in these lines of thought.

1. 'So, Accelerationism, What's All That About?' - deontologistics.co/2018/02/18/oft…

2. 'Prometheanism and Rationalism' -

3. 'Moral Logic, The Diversity of Nature, and the Nature of Diversity' - deontologistics.co/2019/10/06/tfe…

4. 'In Defence of Crypto-Accelerationists' -

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1184864552690864136?s=20

5. 'From Cyberpunk to the CCRU' -

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1347929917976174592?s=20

6. 'Casual Irony Vs. Robust Sincerity' -

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1346957801986400257?s=20

7. 'Dysphoria and Technologies of the Self' -

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1346957801986400257?s=20

8. 'Against Eugenics' -

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1364503288629121032?s=20

9. 'The Aristocratic Monopoly of The Clever' -

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1364848248851202053?s=20

And finally, as if to dramatise all the above:

10. 'Lost in the Labyrinth' - deontologistics.co/2021/02/25/los…

🖖